The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has been celebrating the 100th birth anniversary of maestro - composer - celebrity Leonard Bernstein. The local NPR station's arts maven Lois Reitzes calls it the "Lentennial," appreciating Bernstein's legacy in conversations with music educator Scott Stewart. For my own personal celebration, I curated the ASO series for my fellow subscribers Susan and Suzanne and read Jamie Bernstein's Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein. The big surprise in her book is that her experience of him up close was not so different from mine, long - distance.
In the early 1960s, while Jamie lived with Lenny in a town home across the street from Carnegie Hall, Lenny was also a presence in our family room, both on the black and white television and on the LP of the film West Side Story that I played obsessively. I recognized Leonard Bernstein before I recognized Superman. Lenny was a spectacle, arms waving, hair flying. When West Side Story first showed on TV, I was 11 years old, and captivated all over again. A few years later, our family saw his Mass directed by Robert Shaw with the ASO, a piece that grew on me over the next few years, with help from musician friends, who delighted in mastering his tricky time signatures. I fell in love with Chichester Psalms the first time I heard it, and it helped me to fall in love with God and the aesthetic of Anglican church music. By the time I graduated high school, Bernstein's music was what I sang at the top of my lungs when I was driving alone and happy, and it was his gnarly dissonances that I pounded on the piano when teenage angst overwhelmed me.
I wrote all this in a letter to him around his 70th birthday, when there had been several unkind re-assessments of him in the press, abetted by a salacious unauthorized biography of him. Flattered, he wrote me a letter, addressing me as "W. S. S.*", the asterisk taking me to a post script that pointed out that I shared initials with West Side Story. He invited me to write lyrics for his next musical -- absolutely my own fantasy since 9th grade -- and set up a phone conversation.
Jamie Bernstein is able to describe what happened next, because Lenny did it so often. Jamie calls it "shrinking" a man over the phone, "asking him personal questions and drawing him out," looking for a fresh young admirer to bed (307). Within seconds on the phone, I knew he was drunk, alone, mouth full ("Crab; delicious"), and he was insinuating sexuality into the conversation: "You teach eighth grade, eh? Their sap must be rising...." He mocked my midwestern family's background ("How do you know so much about music when your family comes from Cincinnati?"), said he could barely understand me with my Southern accent (I have none), and volunteered that "some people say" his friend, my hero, Stephen Sondheim isn't much of a composer. When he'd gone too far, and I was too angry, I fell silent. He said, "You're not comfortable talking about this?" We left the matter of collaboration for some other time -- I wasn't going to quit teaching to stay with him in New York.
Jamie, too, was appalled by her father's behavior, such as calling people "f***face," and sticking his tongue in the mouths of new acquaintances. "I'm pretty sure he thought he was being an adorable rapscallion," she writes (266). Throughout the book, she describes how he got away with speeding, bad behavior, unhealthy behavior, and never felt the consequences. She says he lived within a "magic circle." But it all came home to him in his sad, excruciating last two decades. His much - touted collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner for the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a "capital F failure" in the Bicentennial year; the death of his wife Felicia Montealegre left him unmoored (264). There had been truth in one of those unkind reassessments, by Leon Botstein, who wrote in 1983 of Bernstein's "haze of decadence and mental drowsiness, a mind exhausted by exposure, excessive fame, and wealth" (omitting, Jamie writes, the scotch and prescription pills) (267).
Like Jamie Bernstein, I cringe at a lot of Bernstein's choices. She and I were repelled by his Kaddish Symphony, with its self-indulgent spoken text, which may have been directed at God, or at Lenny's own father:
...ancient, hallowed,
Lonely, disappointed Father:
Betrayed and rejected Ruler of the Universe,
Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty... (290)
(Jamie suggests that text was a description of Lenny himself, at least as he was in the last decade.) We cringe at some arch and clumsy ideas in 1600; we're embarassed by the way Lenny's opera A Quiet Place exposes private corners of his own life -- pansexuality, filial relations bordering on incest (explicit in the opera), resentments of his own father Sam -- the name of the father in the opera. "And yet, and yet," Jamie writes of 1600, but she could mean any of his compositions, "So much of Daddy's music was beautiful. Wipe - your -eyes beautiful.... But his huge score had been stuffed into a vehicle that could not carry it" (183). She quotes Stephen Sondheim saying," At least when Lenny falls off the ladder, he falls off the highest rung."
Lenny expressed his best self in the passages of his music that, for me, rise above everything else about him. In my teens, I liked best his propulsive passages, present in so many Bernstein scores, where an orchestra exults in a rhythm that Jamie mimics with "Hot dog! Hot dog! Hamburger!" That would be the first Chichester psalm, the glorious "Rosinante" passage of the poem "To Julia Borgos" in Songfest, and the uplifting "Gloria Tibi" in Mass, shortened to "Hamburger! Hot dog!"
But now I love most those places where Bernstein draws a melody of spiritual yearning out of accompaniment that he himself calls "profane." The strings in the Jeremiah rise above the pounding of the orchestra in the second movement, subtitled "Profanation"; in Chichester Psalms, the boy soprano sings in Hebrew "The Lord is my shepherd" over a chorus that shout-sings "the nations rage!" (music intended originally for the Jets and Sharks, Stephen Sondheim tells us in his memoir); for Mass, Lenny makes the beautiful a cappella choral prayer "Almighty Father, Incline Thine Ear" from the melody of his "fetishistic" dance around the altar. I'd include with these an intensely moving piece from Songfest, Bernstein's setting of a fragmentary Walt Whitman letter or poem,"To What You Said," making it a song of repressed love -- "Behold, love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious" -- over a relentless ostinato in the bass. (What a testament to Bernstein's resourcefulness that this music, perfectly fitted to Whitman's restrained, aching lines, was actually salvaged from 1600.)
This little man, so self-centered, so arrogant, so voracious for adulation - was also a generous teacher, whose legacy lives in major musical performers and composers today. There was the gross, profane side; but this lovely music rises above it.
Jamie, too, was appalled by her father's behavior, such as calling people "f***face," and sticking his tongue in the mouths of new acquaintances. "I'm pretty sure he thought he was being an adorable rapscallion," she writes (266). Throughout the book, she describes how he got away with speeding, bad behavior, unhealthy behavior, and never felt the consequences. She says he lived within a "magic circle." But it all came home to him in his sad, excruciating last two decades. His much - touted collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner for the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a "capital F failure" in the Bicentennial year; the death of his wife Felicia Montealegre left him unmoored (264). There had been truth in one of those unkind reassessments, by Leon Botstein, who wrote in 1983 of Bernstein's "haze of decadence and mental drowsiness, a mind exhausted by exposure, excessive fame, and wealth" (omitting, Jamie writes, the scotch and prescription pills) (267).
Like Jamie Bernstein, I cringe at a lot of Bernstein's choices. She and I were repelled by his Kaddish Symphony, with its self-indulgent spoken text, which may have been directed at God, or at Lenny's own father:
...ancient, hallowed,
Lonely, disappointed Father:
Betrayed and rejected Ruler of the Universe,
Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty... (290)
(Jamie suggests that text was a description of Lenny himself, at least as he was in the last decade.) We cringe at some arch and clumsy ideas in 1600; we're embarassed by the way Lenny's opera A Quiet Place exposes private corners of his own life -- pansexuality, filial relations bordering on incest (explicit in the opera), resentments of his own father Sam -- the name of the father in the opera. "And yet, and yet," Jamie writes of 1600, but she could mean any of his compositions, "So much of Daddy's music was beautiful. Wipe - your -eyes beautiful.... But his huge score had been stuffed into a vehicle that could not carry it" (183). She quotes Stephen Sondheim saying," At least when Lenny falls off the ladder, he falls off the highest rung."
Lenny expressed his best self in the passages of his music that, for me, rise above everything else about him. In my teens, I liked best his propulsive passages, present in so many Bernstein scores, where an orchestra exults in a rhythm that Jamie mimics with "Hot dog! Hot dog! Hamburger!" That would be the first Chichester psalm, the glorious "Rosinante" passage of the poem "To Julia Borgos" in Songfest, and the uplifting "Gloria Tibi" in Mass, shortened to "Hamburger! Hot dog!"
But now I love most those places where Bernstein draws a melody of spiritual yearning out of accompaniment that he himself calls "profane." The strings in the Jeremiah rise above the pounding of the orchestra in the second movement, subtitled "Profanation"; in Chichester Psalms, the boy soprano sings in Hebrew "The Lord is my shepherd" over a chorus that shout-sings "the nations rage!" (music intended originally for the Jets and Sharks, Stephen Sondheim tells us in his memoir); for Mass, Lenny makes the beautiful a cappella choral prayer "Almighty Father, Incline Thine Ear" from the melody of his "fetishistic" dance around the altar. I'd include with these an intensely moving piece from Songfest, Bernstein's setting of a fragmentary Walt Whitman letter or poem,"To What You Said," making it a song of repressed love -- "Behold, love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious" -- over a relentless ostinato in the bass. (What a testament to Bernstein's resourcefulness that this music, perfectly fitted to Whitman's restrained, aching lines, was actually salvaged from 1600.)
This little man, so self-centered, so arrogant, so voracious for adulation - was also a generous teacher, whose legacy lives in major musical performers and composers today. There was the gross, profane side; but this lovely music rises above it.
- Read my piece, "The Weight of Bernstein's Mass."
- I review performances by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra of Bernstein's first symphony Jeremiah (01/2018), second symphony Age of Anxiety (09/2017), suite from West Side Story (04/2013), and Chichester Psalms (04/2019).
- "Make Our Garden Grow," final chorus of his musical Candide, didn't mean much to me when I saw the show in 9th grade (my first Broadway musical!); but then, hearing it on the radio one Sunday thirty years later, I had to pull my car over because I was weeping. Why? I'm still not sure; but I write in detail about Barbara Cook's treatment of the song in my reflection on her memoir.
The Spielberg remake had me falling in love with West Side Story again (12/2021).
My anecdote about the phone conversation gets a bit more detail in a piece about Stephen Sondheim's Kurt Weill - Ira Gershwin parody, "The Saga of Lenny."
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